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Imagine this: a purse falls off a chair in the vicinity of two seven-month-old puppies. Terrified, one of the puppies refuses to go anywhere near it. Her sister takes a look, gives it a quick sniff and then leaps over it and goes on her merry way. Scenarios like this happen every day to Holly and Kit, the Border Collie/Beagle mixed-breed pups adopted by the editor of The Bark a few months ago....

A man had broken his back after a fall and was found on the side of his road with a dog who was unwilling to leave his side. That’s the sort of loyalty dogs are famous for, and many dogs live up to this high standard. There are countless examples of dogs who stayed with a person in a crisis situation, providing protection, warmth or simply company.
On the other hand, there are dogs who aren’t as...

(This post is a response to Which Emotions Do Dogs Actually Experience? by Stanley Coren, Ph.D., F.R.S.C.)
Dogs are amazing nonhuman animal beings (animals) and anyone who's known a dog knows this. Just today Dr. Stanley Coren published a very interesting essay called "Which Emotions Do Dogs Actually Experience?" and concluded, among other things:
"However, we know that the...

Leaving a dog alone and unconfined at home works out beautifully for millions of families. People leave to go to work, and return to find a dog who is pleased to see them and a house that is exactly as it was in the morning. However, the experience of coming home to a dog who is pleased to see them AND mass destruction is hardly unusual either.
Often this has happened unexpectedly since steps...

While dog sitting a big Chocolate Lab, I noticed that when we humans went upstairs, he stayed at the bottom of the steps. He had that, “What about poor me?” look about him, and I assumed he was not comfortable with stairs. Perhaps he had no experience with them, or a bad experience had made him nervous about them. There are a lot of dogs who don’t like stairs, and I assumed Bear was one of them...

The dog was running away as fast as he could from what scared him, but unfortunately, he couldn’t get away from it. That’s because he was running away from his extendable leash, and it was still attached to him. The dog had hit the end of the leash and pulled hard enough to jerk the handle from his guardian’s hand. The handle had come flying towards him as the leash fed back into it at top speed...

A friend suggested that one of the reasons we love dogs so much is that they can’t talk back. But I wonder whether that’s true. Sure, a dog won’t tell you, “You really shouldn’t have that second cookie,” but does that mean dogs are not talking back?
Dogs are anything but mute, and while we usually focus on wagging tails and beguiling eyes, vocalizations—among them, barks and growls—provide us...

Between the muddy paws, the dog hair, the gooey toys and the drool, it’s easy to argue that dogs create a certain challenge to cleanliness. I know of only a few dog guardians whose homes are in the kind of shape that makes them look like magazine spreads on decorating. At some point, most of us just throw up our hands and decide that this is how we live. Except for special occasions, we are okay...

It makes me tremendously happy to look at photos of dogs from my past. As I get older, I make more of an effort to capture expressions, behavior and moments that I know I’ll want to see even after the dog is gone. It’s easy to assume that I could never forget certain images that seem seared into my brain, but experience has taught me that to rely completely on my memory is a gamble.
I have many...

I went outside with Bear, the super-sized chocolate lab who was staying with us for the weekend, and it was immediately apparent that we had different goals. My plan was to collect some firewood and bring it inside. Bear may not have had any plans ahead of time, but as soon as he saw the stacks and stacks of firewood, he developed an idea based on his response to seeing the wood pile. His...